THE INSTITUTION
OF MOTHERHOOD

In North America, the prototypical "good mother" is likely to be white, married, not working in a job that takes her away "too much" from her parenting responsibilities; has only one or two children, and they do not have any physical defects or behavioural problems. She conceived her children and is raising them in a heterosexual relationship; and she and her spouse are older than 20 years of age and are of the same ethnic and racial background. The more a mother deviates from this prototype, the more likely that she and her mothering practices will be marginalized (Coll et al. 1998. Pg.6)

Further oppression of women occurs when mothers are blamed for their children’s problems and larger societal problems that are structural and beyond their scope. This blame creates further damage when mothers internalise this pervasive personal and intellectual isolation and marginalization. Cultural persciptiveness about the image of the "good mother" further marginalizes women who are mothering with diverse circumstances.

The definition of the "good mother" is ideologically charged in our society and has changed over time to suit the changing needs of the capitalist nation. In Ontario in 1916, the Bureau of Child Welfare was established as part of an effort to improve high infant mortality rates and the general poor health of Canadian men. The poor health of Canadian men became evident when a substantial proportion of potential recruits were rejected on the basis of poor health, when signing up for military service in World War 1.

Although poverty, overcrowding and malnutrition were acknowledged contributors to the problem, the intervention direction was almost exclusively an individual approach directed at mothers. This was an era before pasteurisation and widespread availability of sterilised baby formula, so, women were encouraged to breastfeed and set aside work in the paid labour force or any other responsibility that interfered with breastfeeding.

During the 1920’s and 30s, "scientific" child care was implemented which corresponded with the expansion of science and the medical profession. Every mothering activity was to be carefully regimented and monitored. Feeding, diapering and bathing were to be dictated "by the clock". Mothers were warned against relying upon their "maternal instincts", and kissing of young children was forbidden as it was believed to spread germs. The reality of poor women was ignored when advice was given about hiring help for six weeks postpartum, and living accommodations. One prominent health crusader, Helen MacMurchy wrote in her pamphlet, "Never let the baby sleep with anybody…A flat is not a good place for a baby"(Arnup et al, 1986 pg. 202)

A brief time during World War II, was the only period of time that Canada endorsed a national daycare program. The definition of a "good" mother at this time, was a mother who worked in an area where there was a shortage of male labour. The end of the war saw an abrupt change and women were forced to hand their jobs back to men. In keeping with the needs of the state, they were encouraged to stay home, have babies and become consumers.

By the 1950’s and 60’s the medicalization of childbirth had reached its height and bottle-feeding of infants in North America had become more common than breastfeeding. Women were routinely sedated to the point of missing the birth of their baby, and at the hospital, mothers were most likely not given the chance to breastfeed. Companies such as Gerber and Carnation benefited and expanded from women relinquishing the task of infant feeding to them. The institution of motherhood changed drastically in the first half of the 20^th century, and can be seen to have been informed by the dictates of national and commercial interests.

The therapeutic or individual approach of women in social work has historically focused on women helping "other" women to be better mothers. In London, England of the late 1800’s, women from the middle and upper classes had become an active presence in the lives of the poor. Young privileged women actually yearned for the slums. For women enmeshed in Victorian gentility, exploring London poverty added zest and romance to their otherwise staid existences. And thanks to London’s excellent regional railway network, ladies and gentlemen could combine work with the poor with the routines of middle-or upper-class life (Ross 1993).

From the British perspective, the field of social work appears to have sprung from the need for recreation or diversion of the privileged class. And if we think that the profession of social work in Canada has come along way from offering a diversion for privileged women, we need look at the research that points out that white women were the group most to benefit from affirmative action policy in Canada. Along with the reality that social workers, like other professional, middle class, white women have children, and their maintenance of middle class participation in society, is dependant on domestic workers (nannies) of colour.

Becoming a mother tends to have different antecedents for women of different social classes. Compounded by women’s different educational and income-earning resources and lack of social support in raising children, it also has different consequences for how women experience social citizenship. Policies with the ‘regular’ worker in mind do not serve women well(Vosko, 1996 in Evans and Werkerle 1997). Middle class women can experience motherhood and look forward to a pension from their participation in the recognised labour force. While women who are single parents on assistance, or who are working class and unable to afford the cost of childcare, are likely to experience poverty and old age at the same time.

Social citizenship, is shaped by women’s roles as mothers, carers and paid workers and is constricted by the ideology and reality of women’s economic dependency. Claims made through social assistance on the basis of ‘citizen-mother’ are accorded neither the degree of legitimacy nor the level of benefits that accompanies ‘worker’ claims through social insurance(Evans 1997). Women who are "working" in paid labour are entitled to make limited claims employment insurance. Women who are caring for a child already are afforded no such claims. The changing images of women as ‘mothers’ and women as ‘workers’ that underpin income security play a defining role in relations between women and the welfare state.

This worker-mother dichotomy is also played out in the class and race tensions in the welfare mother characterisation. At the core of this characterisation is the patriarchal force that struggles to control women’s sexuality and reproduction. Moral panic around the issue of welfare mothers, is more about children being perceived as primarily men’s children, produced through women’s bodies, than it is about poor black mothers creating a drain on the welfare state. According to Coll, Surrey and Weingarten (1998), Ronald Reagan’s family policies were as much about shoring up patriarchy as they were about establishing capitalism. Ensuring that women as mothers do not raise children independently is about maintaining the gendered nature of heterosexuality and the economic dependency that must follow.

In the United States the reality is that few adolescents engage in sex in order to become parents and thereby claim welfare or housing subsidy(Furstenberg, 1992, p. 240 in Coll et al. 1998). Some theorists argue that unwed women’s claims on welfare are in fact caused by the failure of the capitalist state to generate full employment. Male unemployment has made it impossible for many young men to support families. Contrary to the myth of the black single mother on welfare, the increase in unmarried birth-rates in the United States has occurred amongst white women(Coll, Surrey and Weingarten 1998).

Linda McQuaig (1998) argues that high unemployment in Canada is desirable and maintained by banks and other financial power brokers, who benefit from the high interest rates and low inflation that accompany high unemployment. The desire for high unemployment and the consequential inability of young males to support families, may indicate that if the free market considers unemployment to be a benefit, the state will have to take over supporting children. For women who are forced to depend on government assistance, the power and capriciousness of husbands is being replaced by the arbitrariness, bureaucracy and power of the state, the very state which has upheld patriarchal power(Coll et al. 1998).

Among Fabian circles of the late-nineteenth-century England, one woman did have a vision that would place motherhood as a compensated and acknowledged part of patriarchal, capitalist society. Eleanor Rathbone formulated the Endowment of Motherhood Movement which proposed the idea that "society" rather than the "male parent" should pay directly for the "cost of renewal". There would be a well funded set of health services for mothers and children as well as a new method for the national distribution of income that acknowledged the wife-mother’s social contribution. State subsidies to mothers would eliminate the demeaning "economic dependency of the married woman" which Rathbone’s Family Endowment Committee saw as the badge of female "subjection"(Ross, 1993).

The "family wage" was to be replaced by a new system in which wages for both male and female employees would be aimed at the support of only one dependant, and state agencies would supply wives with housekeeping fund based on the number of children they cared for. Money issued to mothers would be in recognition of the social value of the work they were doing as mothers.

This endowment notion was viewed as controversial but reasonable in 1919, however, by the mid 1920’s, Rathbone’s ideas began to lose appeal. The only tangible result of the Family Endowment movement was a token mothers allowance which was granted in 1945. Although it is difficult to believe that such a woman centred proposal would ever gain ground in a capitalist, patriarchal society, this kind of endowment plan had the potential of evolving society into one that would see the engendered division of the work of reproduction ended. While women involved in this movement were likely to have supported the maternal superiority of women as caregivers, the ideal consequence of their plan, would have been the result of men becoming equal parents. Thus allowing women to participate equally in the benefits of society outside the home while men shared domestic work equally.

The present reality in Canadian families, is a far cry from equality. While women are participating in the workforce more than ever, and continue to earn less than men, studies have repeatedly shown that they still retain primary responsibility for work in the home (Luxton 1990, Michelson 1985, 1988; Bourdais et al., 1987). Over two-thirds (68 per cent) of employed women with children under 6 years of age worked full-time in 1991. Yet, Eighty-three per cent of women spend an average of 2.25 hours a day on housework, compared with just 50 per cent of employed men who spend an average of 1.75 hours a day doing housework. When it comes to meal preparation, 78 per cent of women had sole responsibility. In the areas of cleaning and laundry, 77 percent of women were burdened with this task. (Statistics Canada, 1992d:4; taken from Evans and Werkerle 1997)

Homeless single mothers can count on little of no recognition of their special needs of mothers. According to 1995 American statistics, 79% of homeless families in 29 major cities were headed by single parents. In these predominantly female led families, 59% of women said unavailability of childcare was a barrier to gaining employment and a home. Yet Canada and the United States have no national system of childcare like other countries such as France and Sweden. This lack of structural supports corresponds with the dominant American belief system, that it is the moral fabric of individuals, not the social and economic structure of society, that is taken to be the root of the problem. Social activists close to the issues would disagree;

There are important differences between the ways it which working women and middle class women experience motherhood. These differences were reported by McMahon in 1995, from data gathered in 1988-1989, through in-depth interviews with 59 mothers living and working in the metropolitan Toronto area. Middle-class women indicated that they had to achieve maturity before having a child, while working-class women saw themselves as achieving maturity through having a child. Motherhood was taken more for granted among working-class women, while for middle class women motherhood was seen more as a lifestyle choice.

The average age working-class became mothers was 22.1, while for middle-class women it was 30.5. Middle-class women do not typically give birth in their teens or early 20’s when they have little post-secondary education and limited work experience. Middle class women do not typically become welfare mothers. Seventy-one per cent of all middle-class women planned their first pregnancies while only 46% of working-class women planned their first pregnancy.

It is not early childbearing itself, that causes poverty, but the reality that women in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, who become mothers in their teens come predominantly from groups of women who are already economically, educationally, and economically disadvantaged. It has been difficult for middle-class people to understand how motherhood is viewed so positively by many economically disadvantaged women. However, for these women, motherhood may offer a means of (temporary) liberation from dreary work (Griffin, 1989) and remains one of the most valued aspects of the feminine role. Middle-class women, on the other hand, can find valued adult identities and self-esteem in the roles and relationships of advanced education or professional training (Rubin, 1976, p, 41; Sidel, 1990, p150).

Rubin (1976) argues that accidental pregnancies among young working-class women are often not truly accidental. She contends that, the emotional pain of growing up in families scarred by poverty, creates particular urgent needs to escape parental control, to assert adult identity, and to find safety and nurturance. Rubin’s assertion that accidental early pregnancy is chosen on some sort of conscious level by working class, seems like one more way to blame individual women for the larger structural issues of poverty in which they exist.

However, Roddy Doyle’s portrayal of Paula in his novel The Woman Who Walked into Doors, illustrates how one working-class woman’s need to escape poverty, parental control and seek safety and nurturance in her own family, put her at risk. Paula had a desire to escape a family in poverty as well as the hopelessness of her future prospects, which was created out of being placed in a stream of school that she described as "the dopes, the thicks…nearly retarded" The destruction of her hopes for the future can be seen in this passage;

Although spousal abuse is by no means confined to the working class, working class mothers like Paula are more likely to lack the resources to leave an abusive situation. The younger age that working class women become mothers increases the likelihood that they will be economically dependant upon their spouses.

Mothers like Paula, who are seriously compromised in their ability to access social resources are blamed, mis-seen, or vilified. It is precisely in the context of the unrealistic demands placed on contemporary mothers that marginalization of mothers and their mothering practices take place. Marginalization is the social phenomenon of being diminished and devalued in comparison to others, or having one’s ideas, feelings, practices or actions rendered less valid or useful in relation to a dominant ideal. Value is placed on the experiences of those in the Centre, and less value, no value, or a negative value is placed on those pushed to the margins(Coll et al. 1998).

Those who are marginalized also resist, motherhood as resistance can also be seen as creating a counter-culture. Mothering to persisting in practising one’s own language, religion, health-care, community or family against the dominant ideals, is resistance. Enduring on-going hardship as mothers do, while refusing to give up one’s belief or life, is resistance. As a member of a marginalized culture, raising one’s children to understand and to live in both their own and the dominant culture, is resistance(Stacey 1997 from Coll et all. 1998).

The theme of motherhood as resistance and creation of a the counterculture of motherhood, comes across clearly in these letters published as "Litters" in the Spring 1997 issue of the rural Ontario magazine; The Compleat Mother: The Magazine of Pregnancy, Birth & Breastfeeding.

How does The Compleat Mother define "real" mothering? Notions of "real" and "natural" are culturally constructed. This counter-culture magazine defines these terms by actions such as homebirth, prolonged nursing, opposition to large multi-national companies who persistently market breastfeeding substitutes, rejection of immunisation and infant male circumcision, large families, home schooling and stay-at-home parents(mostly mothers).

The counter-culture of the Compleat mother is situated in a specific social context that may not include women of colour and immigrants. For example, the option of homebirth is mostly a reality for white middle-class "low risk" women. (Reid 1998) Immigrant women are frequently diagnosed as "high risk" or having "infant at risk" due to language barriers and labelling which accentuates differences, and interprets them as deficits. (Fraktman, 1998) The label of "high risk" carries with it the probability of increased medical intervention, therefore immigrant women are more likely to undergo Caesarean section births. Social workers involved can further self-empowerment through the provision of information and support, for women who are experiencing a sense of victimisation, and have been negatively affected by poverty and stress in their lives.

Because women’s experience and ideas of motherhood varies greatly according to the diversity of women, it is problematic to propose any utopic view of what motherhood would look like. For example, second wave white feminists such as Betty Friedan in her 1977 book The Feminine Mystique, lamented the isolation that white middle class women felt while caring for children at home. These women left themselves open to criticism by black women who were seldom afforded the privileged of being able to raise their own children. The challenge for women seems to be, the ability to transform the oppressive ideologies of motherhood into cultural practices that support the multiplicity of ways that motherhood is lived.